"If the Nuremberg trials were political theatre, writer and director James Vanderbilt leans into the spectacle of it. His new movie Nuremberg, about the show put on for the rest of the world to indict Nazi war criminals, is packaged like old-fashioned entertainment. There are movie stars (chiefly Rami Malek and Russell Crowe) with slicked-back hair, trading snappy barbs and self-important monologues in smokey rooms, meanwhile the gravity of the moment tends to be kept at bay."
"All the bureaucratic and legal speak around fine-tuning an unprecedented process, where one country prosecutes the high command of another, goes down easy in an Aaron Sorkin sort of way. It is riveting when its urgency is defended by an actor as great as Michael Shannon. It is all so watchable, to a fault, especially when dealing with the unspeakable. There's some rhyme and reason to the director's approach."
Nuremberg frames the postwar trials as old-fashioned entertainment, filled with movie-star performances and slick showmanship that often deflects the full weight of the atrocities. Smooth, Sorkin-like legal and bureaucratic dialogue makes complex processes go down easily, and charismatic performances keep urgency watchable, notably when Michael Shannon defends urgency. The film focuses on two performative figures: Douglas M. Kelley, a confident psychiatrist who revels in reading and misdirection, and Hermann Göring, portrayed as grandstanding and flippant. Visual choices and staging emphasize spectacle over solemnity, producing a riveting but sometimes unsettling gloss atop unspeakable historical horror.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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